Without a Trace of Doubt in My Mind

Rereading Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven (which is fascinating and you should read it right now—seriously, I don't know why you're still sitting here) a couple of weeks ago, I started thinking about Joseph Smith and the concept of belief. I'm a deeply secular person, as I've been for most of my life (the exception being until I was around eight, when my family had a game known as "What Does Your God Look Like Today?"), who, while she still has a lot of faith, has trouble subscribing to any of the ideas that drive organized religion. From this deeply secular perspective, it's easy for me to feel that Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, was an incredibly charismatic, untreated schizophrenic. He was visited by an angel who told him that he could find golden plates on which were inscribed the story that became The Book of Mormon; once translated (which translation Joseph Smith conducted by burying his face in a hat that contained a "peep stone" and using spectacles made of rocks provided him by the Angel Moroni) and transcribed by his wife and members of his community, Smith returned the plates to the angel, and thus the most successful homegrown American religion was born. In admiring Krakauer's skill at telling such stories as the one above without irony, anger or judgment, though, it occurred to me that it is entirely historically irrelevant whether or not Joseph Smith was schizophrenic.

As someone who tends to set a lot of store by facts, that notion interests me. The historical significance of Joseph Smith is that he singlehandedly created a religion—okay, not "singlehandedly" per se, as very little happens that way, but certainly he was the visionary and nothing would ever have happened without him—that has endured and strengthened over the last one hundred and eighty-odd years, with an enduring mythology that speaks deeply to more than ten million people, and in his lifetime caused enough controversy and reaction that he was thrown from a window by an angry mob before he was forty. From that man came a complex, developed American religion of a scale we as a nation hadn't seen before or since—and I want to debate whether he was schizophrenic, whether it is indeed possible to have an angel appear before you and offer golden plates, whether peep stones in fact translate angelic runes? Seriously.

I have, as I've mentioned before, a great deal of faith in the power of belief. It sounds tautological; it might be. But if Joseph Smith's schizophrenia or lack thereof is historically irrelevant, by the same token the historical truth behind any religion, from the coat of many colors to the crucifixion to the angel Moroni, is irrelevant. Faith, as I see it, is itself the basis for power—all kinds, including staying power.

Recently I had a conversation with an artistic collaborator whose views differ drastically from my own. He once considered himself a homosexual, but has since come to believe that his behavior was not sanctioned by God, and he sought forgiveness through an organization called Love in Action. I knew him when he called himself homosexual (in college), fell out of touch with him for a while and heard only secondhand information about his experiences, and then a couple of years ago we got back into contact through theatrical interests. (We're currently writing a musical together.) The first couple of times that the differences in our beliefs came up, I told him, honestly, that I wanted to have the conversation with him about he he came to be where he is, but I could not have it casually. At his insistence, we came to it a couple of weeks ago.

Based on my collaborator's time with Love in Action and on his own long-held (though lapsed during much of the period when he believed himself to be gay) religious/spiritual beliefs, he feels that homosexual behavior is destructive to anyone who engages in it, that the only sex acceptable in the eyes of God is heterosexual monogamous marital sex, that homosexuality is not something born into people but rather a sinful impulse born of a lack of masculine love or support in childhood; the impulse is akin to, say, the urge to shoplift, in that it cannot be seen as unreasonable or wrong to have the impulse, but it is wrong, an act against God, to act on it. If we are all listening carefully, according to this belief system, when engaging in a sinful sexual behavior we will hear the voice of the Holy Spirit, encouraging us to desist. It's the refusal to listen to this voice which causes so much anxiety, neurosis, psychological damage in contemporary homosexual communities; men suffer more from this than women because women are by nature more relationship-oriented, but anybody who persists in this sinful behavior is damaging themselves spiritually, which seems to basically equate to psychologically.

Regular readers of this blog obviously know how inimical this is to my beliefs. (While I urge discussion and debate, I also request that it be done respectfully, as my artistic collaborator is himself a sometime reader.) It was one of the more difficult conversations I've ever engaged in. At the end of its first segment, where he was much more the talker and I much more the listener (he, after all, has had the opportunity to spend some time living in the world I now inhabit, whereas in my liberal urban upbringing and young adulthood I've barely touched upon such a community as his), he asked me what I thought about it all. There were a lot of ways I could've chosen to be provocative at this point, and I admit I did choose a couple of them (I asked his opinion on evolution, for example), but the overarching conclusion, which I shared, was the interesting fact that, even as we are going to continue to work together and have great respect for one another as artists, we each have a deeply held belief system allowing us to completely dismiss the other as a person, and we're going to continue holding those beliefs. I'm interested in women because I have not listened sufficiently closely to the voice of the Holy Spirit continually endeavoring to speak to me; he's so in need of a religious community's approval that he's denying his true nature and desires and can't *really* be happy. That's only slightly oversimplified.

I guess my question, then, is what is historically relevant here? Not that I'm expecting my collaborator or myself to have any major-league historical significance, but can I possibly make this a question of who is right? He and I certainly disagree about which of our perspectives is leading the public opinion polls in America at this point (each thinks the other's, though I can understand where he's coming from), but could we ever win a debate about who's right, any more than we could win a debate about Joseph Smith's mental illness? It only works if you believe in mental illness.

What does that say? It says we can't run a world without belief, but that the world isn't run on truth, simply on belief in truth. That doesn't dismiss objective reality, I don't think, it just somewhat diminishes its relevance.

I want to emphasize, too, that when I say belief I'm not limiting it to religion; as I said above, my beliefs are as fully developed as my artistic partner's. My extremely secular father, visiting me in Chicago about a month ago, was musing on the difficulty of moral development in an ever more secular world, and remarking that among contemporary secular young people my sister and I seem to have managed to develop a working moral operating system (hereinafter referred to as MOS). I will never be swayed to believing that one pair or group of people's mutual and supportive love is inherently better or worse than another's. Should it, indeed, turn out that I enter an afterlife where God Hates Fags (man, this post contains a lot of links to things I vociferously disagree with and find really upsetting—still worth knowing and acknowledging they're in the world, though), that would be unfortunate, but to my mind it would mean that I have a point of contention with God; I still cannot convince myself that my system's inferior, that the world wouldn't be a better place if people followed a system of acceptance than the system Love in Action, or other similar evangelical organizations, preach(es). That assumption may be in error, but I feel close enough to the logic that brought me there that I am sticking to it. I feel it so deeply that, even if I can follow the logics that bring people to a different conclusion, I'm confident it's True—there are many aspects of my beliefs that could ultimately be changed by argument or experience, and I would not list this as one of them. Other people whose beliefs are inimical to mine feel exactly the same. How do we make sustainable communities and worlds out of that?